A former Portage man was awarded $10 million in a civil suit settlement after he was left as an incomplete paraplegic on a job site when hit by a faulty 5-ton crane, lawyers said.
Robert Coppage, now 63, was injured on Jan. 12, 2017 at Niagara-LaSalle Steel’s processing plant in Hammond. A crane pinned him against a wall and crushed him with a load of steel bars, his lawyers Kenneth Allen and Otto Shragal said in a release.
The settlement requires Crane 1 Services — responsible for inspecting overhead cranes at the site — to pay Coppage $10 million. A company representative did not return a request for comment.
“The evidence we marshaled for trial showed that Crane 1 turned a blind eye toward safety by repeatedly overlooking or minimizing this crane’s defective condition,” Shragal said in a release. “Any reasonable inspection of this crane should’ve caused it to be taken out of service, immediately but, tragically, it wasn’t.”
“We hope this significant settlement sends precisely that message to the many steel plants and crane inspection companies in Chicagoland,” Allen added. “Safety must always take priority over production. Because, in the end, putting safety over profits is good business.”
mcolias@post-trib.com
